


Three Times

by slightlykylie



Category: Room - Emma Donoghue
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-28
Updated: 2019-08-28
Packaged: 2020-09-27 15:40:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20410192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slightlykylie/pseuds/slightlykylie
Summary: A journey from Joy to Ma in three pregnancies.





	Three Times

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chelseafrew](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chelseafrew/gifts).

> This was written to a 2016 Yuletide prompt from chelseafrew asking about what Ma's life in Room was like before Jack was born. The scope of this fic goes slightly beyond that, but I hope it's to your liking anyway. Happy belated Yuletide. :)

The first time Ma is pregnant it doesn’t count, so she isn’t Ma at all. She’s 18 and she doesn’t see any need for a broken condom to ruin her future. She finds out she’s pregnant a little later than she’d have liked, late enough that she can feel what it’s doing to her: nausea, exhaustion, what she prefers to think of as “bloating” rather than “beginning to show.” But however she’s feeling, she knows that what she’s carrying around inside her right now isn’t a person. Some people seem to get mixed up on that subject, but it’s always seemed pretty obvious to Joy, and while she might not be able to draw a clear line demarcating the transition point where a fetus switches over to a baby, she knows that at three and a half months’ gestation it definitely hasn’t crossed it. She sets up the clinic appointment with a clear voice and hands that don’t shake; when she gets to the clinic and the protesters are haranguing her, she shrugs off the clinic escort who’s there to help her through the crowd and walks straight in, ignoring the bloody signs and the shouts of the people waving them at her. Why should she give them any attention? They have nothing to do with her. She's not a murderer, she's not a victim, she's certainly not a mother -- she's just herself, slightly pregnant, and soon this blip will be over and she won't be pregnant anymore.

***

  
The second time Ma is pregnant, it doesn’t much matter to her what you’d call the life growing inside her, human or fetus or passenger or parasite, as long as it’s there for her to hold close. She’s been walled up in a cork-lined cell for a year, and her only human contact has been – well, has been none at all, because she knows that as surely as that long-ago fetus wasn’t a human being, neither is the creature who keeps her here. This time she’s even less bothered by definitions and boundary lines than she was the first time, because she can feel the being inside her and it’s a lifeline keeping her sane. She makes a promise, grinding her teeth on it: if the baby will keep her sane she will always, always keep it safe.

The problem is, she doesn’t know how she’s going to do that. And so the second time Ma is pregnant, she is terrified, every step of the way.

It’s hard to remember the hours she spent lying in the bed staring up at the ceiling, trying to picture a God beyond it, begging and pleading from the depths of her soul for a baby, for someone to keep her from being alone in this cell. In that period she left the TV on 24/7, as she’d done since she got it, but as time wore on there was a frantic, manic quality to her refusal to turn it off: she was leaving it on because she was scared to miss a single parenting episode of Dr. Phil, a single reality show episode where a D-list star wept about how hard it was to take care of her baby during the two hours per day that the nanny wasn’t there, a single baby food commercial that just might be showing the right angle to hold a spoon at to properly feed a plump-cheeked six-month-old. She told herself she was just studying in the best way she could with the resources she had available, but it was something more, something embarrassingly close to the philosophy of that stupid book _The Secret _that Oprah’s always talking about and that Joy has always loathed: to get pregnant, she needed to surround herself with images and sounds of babies, she needed to _manifest_ babies, she needed to breathe and sleep and dream and conjure babies. It worked. She got pregnant. And now she’s terrified.

She begs him for a book on childbirth, any book at all, the first one he can find in the $5 book section at WalMart, just _something_. He laughs at her, one of his meaner laughs, and tells her women have been giving birth for centuries and if cave women could survive without _What to Expect When You’re Expecting _so can she. “Next you’re gonna ask me for a, a whatchacallit, what do they do with the drugs –“

“A – it’s an epi…” Epidermis, epidemic, epithet, what the hell is it? “This is what I’m telling you! I don’t know anything!”  


“You don’t need to know that one.” He laughs again, reaches for his fly. She closes her eyes. “You aren’t getting one.”  
  
So Joy has nothing to do but worry.

In the last year Joy has more or less stopped living in her body; it feels like she floated out of it one day when he was on top of her and she hasn’t really gone back since. She’s barely been eating, been bathing even less, hasn’t brushed her teeth or combed her hair in a year. Sometimes she stares at the person in the mirror, greasily pale with swampy dark circles ringing her eyes, and has to struggle to try to remember who it is. But now this new being is trapped in her body too, in this body that Joy has come to loathe and fear so much (if she’d been fat, would he have grabbed her? If she’d been flat-chested, would he? If her butt had been bigger, if her hair had been shorter? What did her body do to make him do this to it?) and it all feels so complicated, trying to bond with the baby inside of her while remaining firmly outside of herself whenever he shows up. Sometimes she loves the feeling of the baby kicking, and sometimes it freaks her out – why is someone kicking her? What does the kicking mean, is the baby trying to get out?

She tries to keep a close hold on her mind while she’s pregnant. If the baby’s throwing her a lifeline, she has to grab it.

So the baby keeps growing, and she keeps watching the TV, flicking from channel to channel at the start of every half-hour, trying to find shows about pregnancy or babies or anything she could possibly use. She rereads all the dreadful books that he bought her, terrible romances and weird supernatural self-help and sparkly vampires and the frigging _Da Vinci Code,_ looking for a sentence, a phrase, a word that might tell her what to do. They have nothing to offer but she rereads them again, reads them until the letters are swimming in front of her eyes, and then she puts them away because her mind is starting to slide again. Her stomach balloons out and none of her clothes fit anymore; she rips the seams on her pants and re-stitches them up halfway, even though she doesn’t need pants in here, because she needs to feel human and functional when the baby comes and lying around with no pants on waiting for your rapist to show up is not a thing functional humans do, she’s almost sure. She will wear her pants, she will comb her hair, she will bathe every day, she will keep herself pulled together so she’ll be ready for the baby when it comes. She will be the best mother on the planet and she will fill every inch of this horrible space with love. Once the baby comes, she will be all right.

  
***  
  
The third time Ma is pregnant she’s lost somewhere deep inside herself. After the second pregnancy – after it – after she – She never finishes that thought, ever. But after it ---- she slipped a lock inside of her and disappeared into a little room she never knew was there, not even during all the torture she’s suffered in this place. She doesn’t respond to him at all when he comes for her now. Sometimes she’s not totally aware that he’s there. She has a dim awareness that he’s doing things that used to make her sick, and a slightly less dim awareness that he has to do them if she’s going to get her little girl back. Before it happened she had decided that if it were a girl she would name her Jacqueline, Jacq for short, and if it were a boy she would name him Connor. Now she knows that if it’s another girl she’ll be Jacq again, and if it’s a boy he’ll be Jack, because she’s certain that Jacq’s spirit can’t have been lost or stolen from her. God can be cruel, but there are some things he can’t do, and Ma knows – she _knows_ – he can’t take her baby from her. Just a little more time, and she will come back.

So she lies on the bed and loses herself within herself. This time around she doesn’t bother with looking for TV programs or books to help her. She and the baby are all bound up in one another, and she swears, in quiet moments, she can hear the baby’s heartbeat. She can feel the baby’s kicks and turns from the moment she realizes she’s pregnant, six weeks in. That might be impossible outside of Room, but in here the laws of physics have been suspended, and she knows it’s true. So she buries herself in flesh and bone, her whole body a protecting embrace for the baby. She goes weeks without saying a word, without turning on the TV, without glancing in the mirror, hearing and feeling nothing but the baby inside her. When she was eighteen and dialing the number for Planned Parenthood, she would have been furious at the suggestion that she was no more than a vessel for a baby. Now it’s all she is and all she wants to be. 

If it doesn’t turn out all right this time, she knows she will kill herself. It’s a knowledge as simple as the alphabet, as basic as knowing the sun will rise tomorrow. She and the baby are bound together now. If it leaves, she will follow.

But then the baby is born, safe and sound, and joy is so mild a word next to what she feels in that moment that it’s entirely beside the point. She pulls the baby to her breast. “Hello, Jack,” she says. And a page turns, and from that moment on she never looks back. 


End file.
